Boots-n-Cats 010: aka Midgar, aka Kung Fu Apocalypse

The more I go through the exercise of constructing these podcasts the more quickly I start to feel a theme emerge from the songs I'm presented with. I don't know if my week naturally shapes which songs I'm drawn to or if I'm getting more adept at recognizing patterns and capitalizing on them. This week the unifying theme was the image of a sprawling, dirty, neon-lit city at night (much like Midgar from Final Fantasy 7). The challenges this week were more technical than conceptual, wrestling with tempo changes and the like. My biggest quandary was whether or not to leave Discopolis and the intro to Alpha in, or just straight cut into Alpha near the lyrics. While I recognized that the smart producer decision would be to make the cut, I ultimately serve myself first and foremost with the podcast. To that end, Discopolis felt like it belonged with this week's theme, that it would be a song I'd associate with this week that I'd want to come back and hear later. As such, it got a stay of execution.

The three keystone songs this week were Eclipse, Shanghai, and Cherry Blossoms. Eclipse helped musically set the tone of the dirty city with its dirty beats, and I quickly found the dirty sound a recurring element of the other progressive house songs I was finding for the front part of the podcast. Shanghai is the song that initially jumped out at me and defined the theme of Midgar; it is conceptually and literally the heart of the podcast this week. Cherry Blossoms is the song I was most looking forward to hearing in full this week, the one I'm still the most anxious to keep listening to, and the heart of the trance back half of the cast; all the other songs feel like they are just there to hold up and support that song, in my mind at least.

Also, at some point in the process the master project name became that of a particular two-song mix I had worked on, Kung Fu and Apocalypse; I just left that as the working title. :-P Until next week, cheers!

Boots-n-Cats 009: Are You Coming Home?

I started listening to electronic music again six months ago on the recommendation of a friend.  I'd been having anxiety dreams a lot more frequently and my friend noted that I had been listening to a lot of melancholy music and that perhaps there was a correlation.  He said I should listen to more uplifting and upbeat for a change and pointed me at Tiesto's Club Life podcast.  Six months later here we are, a little more rested and a little more upbeat.

My challenge this week was confronting the melancholy again in the form of a rather emotional panel of candidate songs.  While I've included some heavy songs on previous podcasts, not as personal nor as concentrated as those this week.   It's been cathartic to revisit these feelings in a concentrated form to see how far I've come.  That being said, I'm ready to put this mix in the books and move on, hence the early posting.

The standouts this week are perhaps rather obvious.  Ghost In The Machine speaks rather directly to the aforementioned anxiety dreams that I've been dealing with.  I connect very much with the sentiment of the lyrics and am very happy that I'm not personally in that place anymore.  Coming Home is a song I considered including several weeks ago, but the original mix never quite worked for me; Harryson's remix changed that.  The song's chorus "the universe cracked open on us; are you coming home?" reminds me all too much of a very tumultuous time in my marriage.  The song seems to beg for the feeling of the sun coming up at the beginning of Enceladus; in fact I feel the songs are practically joined in that way.  I'm again thankful listening to this song that I no longer live in the place this song takes me too.  The final standout song this week, which I think frames this podcast, is Remember.  Its lyrics tear into some very raw feelings of love and opportunities lost, but encourages the listener to not dwell and instead celebrate all the things that you have; I think that sums up the feeling I get listening to this podcast very succinctly.

Until next week, when I hopefully have more upbeat wares, cheers!

Boots-n-Cats 008: AT HOME DEPOT

I had the same anxiety this week about putting together a quality episode that I had last week; it is becoming a trend. The whole process seems so fragile and unlikely to bear fruit when I'm trying to find 16+ new songs I like and stitch them together into a cohesive package. While the act of mixing still presents challenges and room to improve, I find that the stress of the project turns to excitement every week once I determine track ordering. The life skill I hope to eventually develop is to trust myself and not stress out so much just because I cannot see the exact outcome of a situation.

There are generally three keystone songs that define each week for me. This week the keystone songs were Indigo, Lay It All On Me, and Napoleon. My wife likes to pick on obtuse lyrical elements of house music, so when I heard Indigo I knew that "AT HOME DEPOT! I can do this" was going to become a household thing ... and it was. Lay It All On Me just makes me want to sing every time I hear it; it's so uplifting and was the first sure pick for the week I found. Napoleon was a result of me listening to more progressive trance recently in hopes of widening the variety of the show. Being in the 138 bpm category means that it doesn't really play nice with others, but I found it too special to leave out just because of its "social difficulties". It took some finessing, but I managed to find a home for Napoleon as the closer, and I'm glad I put in the effort to make space for it. Until next week, cheers!

Boots-n-Cats 007: Tabula Rasa

For the first week since I've been putting together the podcast, I didn't look forward to the sight of a blank spreadsheet.  I was happy enough with 006 that I was convinced I couldn't do better and didn't really want to try.  I mean I did continue on (obviously), except not with the enthusiasm of "maybe this week I can do better" but instead the certainty that I could not.

An interesting thing came out of that feeling, though.  The palette of songs I arrived at had more range than normal.  Several songs were very dark, seething monsters ("Dance On My Heart", "Morphine", and "Chased") juxtaposed with more melodic, deep songs like "Metaphysical", "Thought of You", and "All My Love".  I was skeptical that they could all be blended together, but I had the attitude of "welp, it's not as going to turn out as well as last week anyway, so might as well take some risks; what is there to lose?"  Although it took some wrangling, I personally think the risks paid off.

I wonder what I can do next week....

Boots-n-Cats 006: Tools are made to be broken

 
In last week's post I mentioned that I ended up determining my track layout for 005 by mapping the tracks to a particular emotional context (in that case a typical day).  The process of mapping was so useful, in fact, that I set out this week to do the same thing from the outset.  Once I had my overall theme, I broke that into 5 suites and quickly found about 3-4 songs for each suite.  "Magnificent!", I thought.  I must be really on to something here ... except that I wasn't.  What seemed like a good idea at first ended up constraining me later on, keeping certain songs in the mix that I wasn't wild about, pushing songs together that didn't fit, etc.

After three days of trying to force my mapping to work I came to a realization:  the mapping was just a tool of my own creation.  I had devised the concept to help me, but it was now hurting me, and that I was free to alter it or abandon it completely, which I ultimately did.  I feel like this sort of occurrence is a common trap people fall into, the idea of keeping loyalty to the initial vision of a project at the expense of its successful completion.  I'm happy with myself that I could identify the fallacy and move past it in this instance.

The podcast this week is my favorite to listen to so far that I've made.  Sifting to find the tracks, mixing everything together, and listening for small adjustments has been the happiest I've been this week by far.  The final product is not perfect, to be certain, but it is something I love.  I can feel myself improving even just through the process this week.  I'm both thrilled with the final product and terrified about starting over from scratch next week and trying to top it, but I guess that's always the challenge set before us: to do better.

Until next week, cheers!

Boots n Cats: New Logo!

First cut at the new logo; it's ... yellow!  Also working on banner design.

Cell-Shading: Week 1

I've been trying to figure out how to get into digital drawing for several months now.  It's difficult to get into a new hobby when you have so little time to throw at it a week.  The first obstacle is that I'm out of practice sketching.  After a few weeks of failed sketching attempts, I decided I'd first work on cell shading.  This required getting someone else more talented to do the sketching for me, so I commissioned Lita Tachibana through her Patreon account to do a sketch a week for me.  The first week's sketch was of my friend's character Alatyr.

(Video of the sketch process can be found here)

I found a couple tutorials on the web for cell-shading in GIMP and tried my hand at shading the above image.  The main takeaway for this week was the value of the layers in keeping the colors separate so that you can adjust them later.  Layers also made it a bit easier to be quick and reckless in places than I could have been otherwise.

I still have a long way to go with knowing where to put the shadows and highlights, not to mention how to blend them effectively.  The shadow and highlight process seems to go easily in the tutorials, but I never seem to have quite the same luck.  All in all, for the first week I'm pretty happy with the results.  I'll likely come back and start from scratch before actually using this image for anything, but it's done for now nonetheless!